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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

> To be honest, good riddance. If it is no longer possible to offer users a "free" service in exchange for extremely invasive spying and psychological manipulation

Is it right that a tiny but loud minority be able to ban these ad-supported services for all of society? Going by revealed preferences, most people don't consider targeting advertising to be "spying and psychological manipulation". If they did, usage patters would differ.

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How does this reconcile with the vast majority of people clicking “ask app not to track” when given the option? Revealed preferences can’t distinguish between things people don’t know about.

Like imagine running an experiment where in option A you get $20, and in option B you get $10. Everyone picks option A, and then the experimenter punches them all in the face because buried 50 pages into the fine print filed in the basement you didn’t know existed, it says that’s part of option A. It would be absurd to then claim “revealed preferences show that people are willing to get punched in the face for $10.”

Regardless, Meta is still allowed to do this, they just have to ask for consent now. So informed preferences will be revealed soon.

> most people don't consider targeting advertising to be "spying and psychological manipulation"

A bit of a catch-22; if they did consider it that, then the manipulation wasn't very good, was it?

The revealed preferences of companies to pay for advertising indicates that it is successful at manipulation, enough to justify its cost.

It is manipulation in the same manner that you are trying to manipulate me by posting your comment.

So much of this rhetoric involves assigning scary words "manipulation", "spying", etc. to everyday events.

Most people don't consider anything that would save them a buck to be a problem, even if the net impact on society is awful. Government exists to look at that bigger picture.

The fact is that the vast majority people have no idea they’re giving companies vast amount of data that’s used to manipulate them. Thousands of A/B tests meant to trigger just the right psychological response to optimize impulse buying drop-shipped Aliexpress junk at 800% markup.

Your premise is wrong. Nothing is "banned for all society".

From TFA: "Meta has to get "opt-in" consent for personalized advertisement and must provide users with a "yes/no" option. "

> Going by revealed preferences,

...people are able to reveal their preferences by opting in.

> usage patters would differ

Usage patterns can't differ if the service is effectively a requirement to participate in modern society regardless of whether you personally agree to the tracking or not.

> Going by revealed preferences, most people don't consider targeting advertising to be "spying and psychological manipulation". If they did, usage patters would differ.

By this logic most people don't actually believe cigarettes are harmful, if they did then usage patterns would differ

Nicotine is actually very effective for schizophrenics, works better than most of the actual medicines. It’s the smoking part that’s bad for you.

Gwern has an interesting writeup[1] on nicotine and how the real damage is from the smoking

[1]: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

Most people have no idea how any of this works, so I wouldn't take observed behavior to be a "revealed preference."

Facebook are NOT banned from providing ad-supported services and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

Facebook are not even banned from using user surveillance for targeted ads.

All Facebook/Meta are banned from doing is making surveillance a condition of using the site. The user can still opt-in to being tracked if they think it's useful and Facebook can still show ads in any case.

These policies stem from elected officials, as far as I can tell. How else would you propose they make policy decisions?

My impression is these decisions are related to genuine concern about how tech companies collect and use personal data.

While I agree with the decisions, I must point that elected officials are far from being representatives for the people for a long time; in many countries they are just puppets for their political parties and elections are a choice between all bad options.

They absolutely do though, people just tend to believe there’s no alternative and take it.

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